Interesting Data from Proton...

So.... unstable government with increasing internet censorship.

Right? Like “turns out it’s just…” implies that the U.S. isn’t 50 states in a trench coat where the federal government changing hands means there isn’t the constant major changing of policy every few years from center-right fence-sitters to chaotic-evil fascists and back again.
- Back again? No. Center-right fence sitters do not move the status quo. They preserve it wherever it lands.
- Well the trench coat...I was about to say a fairly recent addition but some states are younger than that. There was a time when we said "The United States are..." rather than 'The United States is..."
  We are, after all, the world's oldest surviving Federation.
Nothing like a little blue balls to kick start another civil war.

It is essentially internet censorship.

It is ~~essentially~~ internet censorship.

Turns out it's just porn.

🌏👨‍🚀🔫👨‍🚀🌌

Oooh you've been caught with a secret link! I went to select those emojis and YouTube opened lol
- Only a secret for some I guess.
https://youtu.be/-9R-2X9Bl5w
Keep Your Parents Off the Internet. Aged very well...
"The Internet is an outstanding pornography delivery vehicle."
- An error occurred. Please try again later. (Playback ID: x9uBXw9Cu8LEmnOJ)
  Not sure why but I can't play this one for some reason.
  Also, parents back then: "Don't believe everything that's on the internetz!" Parents now: "Did you know that 'insert wild conspiracy bullshit'?!"

Now go find which members of Congress bought a bunch of VPN stock before these bans went into effect.

It just makes me think that neocons will come after vpns soon.

So many businesses use vpns in their day to day operations. There would be a huge push back from companies with money.
- They'd just carve out an exception for corporations but ban private use.
- With the FCC unable to enforce net neutrality, they don't even have to ban VPNs. Just hide some legislation inside an unrelated bill to give $250M to internet providers on the condition that they throttle VPN connections to 100 Kbps*, which those greedy fucks will happily accept.
  *Likely worded as a stipend to improve the infrastructure, but only as long as the infrastructure is not used to aid terrorism™.
- <tunnelsInSSH>
  ¿Problem?

Both.

Same thing happened when Abbott started this whole thing in March of 2024

I wonder if they saw a surge when Disney raised their price twice in a year, or Prime started showing ads.

I know my ISP saw a spike in traffic from Switzerland to my house around the same time.

Weird.

For me it's the amount of traffic between my seedbox in the Netherlands and my home

...doesn't proton claim they don't analyse user data?

To do this graph you don’t have to have any user specific data. Just total amount of new accounts every day per country.
- Yeah, but the "it's just porn, lol ¯(ツ)/¯" conclusion?

... seems like both tbh.

They had a really good signup deal a few months ago: $75 for two years of service.

Love it.

"It's just porn"? What does that mean? Are people sending porn over email or something?

Signups for ProtonVPN
Republican states have banned or blocked porn sites. People are using VPNs to bypass.
- Oooh, I misread. Thanks.
Many US States have new laws that require porn sites to verify age and most porn sites don't want to make themselves a target for Cyber attacks (searching for identity documents) so they deny access to any IP address in the state with that law.
The vpn is just to Make it look like you're in a state that doesn't have these censorship laws
Are people sending porn over email or something?
I like to fax dick pics to land lines that decide to attach a fax machine to them.
Fax is like uhhhhh e-mail for rotary phones.

Is this not them admitting they know your search history to a categorical sense? L data mining

They banned porn in the southern states of the US this week.
- It’s only logical it’ll go up in search trend when something is banned but regardless it doesn’t change the fact they can and will use your data to make profile to sell. Idk why people upset and downvoting like I said something grotesque
As a Network owner, which a VPN owner would ultimately be, they can see the ip's and DNS requests that ultimately leave their headend to reach the actual service you requested, they may not know precisely which user requested what, but with an uptick in sign ups, there will also be an uptick in load on the network, the network engineers could then easily see what traffic has increased out of their headend locations to what ip's/DNS names. If suddenly they notice that there's a much larger count of requests from the headend to say pornhub, then they could reasonably assume those new signups are making those requests. So that at least is one scenario where they wouldn't need to dig into individual traffic profiles to know who is doing what.
Though aside from that, every VPN is going to be able to see which IP reservation requested what traffic via their router and firewall logs, so any VPN you use could if desired identify which user who logged in at a given time did what. It's a matter of if you trust that org to do the minimum with that information. I think a release of their anonymous headend statistics similar to the highest level of Googles "what are people searching for trends" is fairly innocuous compared to releasing say by which state of the US what is their given VPN usage trend.
- Appreciate the explanation, I do understand the sentiment that it is a very apparent observation based on a few different factors but that wasn’t what I was trying to bring to surface, simply wanted to say Proton is not the friendliest provider if you wanted anonymity.
  I even appreciate their joke about “censored government” but hey to all their own.

Probably saw a rise in sign ups from Canada and Brazil....thanks to RFDers who spotted deals that make the plus sub for 2 years for equivalent of 39 CAD